Yanyuwa is a critically endangered language. The anthropologist John Bradley has worked with the Yanyuwa people for three decades and is also a speaker of Yanyuwa. He has produced a large dictionary and grammar of the language,[4] along with a cultural atlas in collaboration with a core group of senior men and women.

Yanyuwa has 16 noun classes, distinguished by prefixes. In some cases, different prefixes are used, depending on whether the speaker is a male or a female.

Yanyuwa Noun Classes

#

prefix

class

example

1

rra-/a-

female (human centred)

rra-bardibardi "old lady"

2

nya- (women's speech) 0- (men's speech)

male (human centred)

(w)nya-malbu (m)malbu "old man"

3

rra-/a-

feminine

a-karnkarnka "white bellied sea eagle"

4

0-

masculine

nangurrbuwala "hill kangaroo"

5

ma-

food (non-meat)

ma-ngakuya "cycad fruit"

6

na-

arboreal

na-wabija "digging stick"

7

narnu-

abstract

narnu-wardi "badness"

8

possessive pronominal prefixes

body parts

nanda-wulaya "her head", (w)niwa-wulaya (m)na-wulaya "his head"

9

0-

familiar kinship

kajaja "father, dad"

10

various pronominal prefixes

formal kinship for close kin

angatharra-wangu "my wife"

11

various pronominal prefixes

formal kinship-grandparent level

karna-marrini "my daughter's child"

12

various pronominal prefixes/suffixes

formal kinship-avoidance

rra-kayibanthayindalu "your daughter in law"

13

rri- dual and li- plural

human group

li-maramaranja "dugong hunters of excellence"

14

rra-/a-, nya-. 0-

personal names

rra-Marrngawi, (w)nya-Lajumba (m)Lajumba

15

rra-/a- / 0-

ceremony names

rra-Kunabibi, Yilayi, rra-Milkathatha

16

0-

place names

Kandanbarrawujbi, Burrulula, Wathangka

Notes:

(w) women's speech, (m) men's speech, 0- no prefix used.

rra- is a more formal female/feminine prefix often used in elicitations, and a- is the informal everyday form. There is only one word in Yanyuwa, rra-ardu "girl", in which the rra- prefix is always used. That distinguish it from the men's speech form ardu "boy" for which women say nya-ardu.

Yanyuwa is unusual among languages of the world in that it has separate dialects for men and for women at the morphological level. The only time that men use the women's dialect is if they are quoting someone of the opposite sex and vice versa.
An example of this speech is provided below:

Avoidance speech is speech style used when talking to or near certain relatives: one's siblings and cousins of the opposite sex, one's brother-in-law, sister-in-law, father-in-law and mother-in-law, and one's nieces and nephews if their father (for male speakers) or their mother (for female speakers) has died. Occasionally, avoidance speech takes the form of different affixes to usual speech, but generally, it is simply a change in vocabulary.

For example, a digging stick is usually referred to as na-wabija, but when talking to one of the above relatives, the word used is na-wulungkayangu.

Another set of vocabulary is used during ceremonies and other ritual occasions. Many of the words used in ritual speech are sacred and kept secret.

For example, a dingo is usually referred to as wardali, but during ritual occasions, the word used is yarrarriwira. That is one ritual term which is known to the general public, as are some other terms for flora and fauna.

When on the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands, which is part of Yanyuwa territory, another set of vocabulary may be used to replace the terms used when on the mainland. There is more variance about the usage of island speech than the other speech styles.

For example, on the mainland, fishing is referred to as wardjangkayarra, but on the islands, the word used is akarimantharra.

Yanyuwa-speakers have actively engaged in making a number of films, and more recently have begun a project to animate important stories and songlines. These include three important films, all of which have extensive narratives in Yanyuwa, with subtitles:

1.
Northern Territory
–
The Northern Territory is a federal Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. It shares borders with Western Australia to the west, South Australia to the south, to the north, the territory is bordered by the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria. Despite its large area—over 1,349,129 square kilometres, the Northern Territorys population of 244,000 makes it the least populous of Australias eight major states and territories, having fewer than half as many people as Tasmania. The archaeological history of the Northern Territory begins over 40,000 years ago when Indigenous Australians settled the region, makassan traders began trading with the indigenous people of the Northern Territory for trepang from at least the 18th century onwards. The coast of the territory was first seen by Europeans in the 17th century, the British were the first Europeans to attempt to settle the coastal regions. After three failed attempts to establish a settlement, success was achieved in 1869 with the establishment of a settlement at Port Darwin. Today the economy is based on tourism, especially Kakadu National Park in the Top End and the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in central Australia, the capital and largest city is Darwin. The population is not concentrated in regions but rather along the Stuart Highway. The other major settlements are Palmerston, Alice Springs, Katherine, Nhulunbuy, residents of the Northern Territory are often known simply as Territorians and fully as Northern Territorians, or more informally as Top Enders and Centralians. With the coming of the British, there were four attempts to settle the harsh environment of the northern coast. The Northern Territory was part of colonial New South Wales from 1825 to 1863, except for a time from February to December 1846. It was part of South Australia from 1863 to 1911, under the administration of colonial South Australia, the overland telegraph was constructed between 1870 and 1872. A railway was built between Palmerston and Pine Creek between 1883 and 1889. The economic pattern of raising and mining was established so that by 1911 there were 513,000 cattle. Victoria River Downs was at one time the largest cattle station in the world, gold was found at Grove Hill in 1872 and at Pine Creek, Brocks Creek, Burrundi, and copper was found at Daly River. On 1 January 1911, a decade after federation, the Northern Territory was separated from South Australia, alfred Deakin opined at this time To me the question has been not so much commercial as national, first, second, third and last. Either we must accomplish the peopling of the territory or submit to its transfer to some other nation. In late 1912 there was growing sentiment that the name Northern Territory was unsatisfactory, the names Kingsland, Centralia and Territoria were proposed with Kingsland becoming the preferred choice in 1913

2.
Dingo
–
The dingo is a wild canine found in Australia. Its taxonomic status as a species remains debated. The dingo is the largest terrestrial predator in Australia, and plays an important role as an apex predator, however, the dingo is seen as a pest by livestock farmers due to attacks on animals. Conversely, their predation on rabbits, kangaroos and rats may be of benefit to graziers, for some Australians, the dingo is a cultural icon. The introduction of the dingo is seen by many as being responsible for thylacine extinction on the Australian mainland about two years ago, although a recent study challenges this view. Dingoes have a prominent role in the culture of Aboriginal Australians as a feature of stories and ceremonies, the dingos habitat ranges from deserts to grasslands and the edges of forests. Dingoes will normally make their dens in deserted rabbit holes and hollow logs close to a supply of water. Despite being an efficient hunter, it is listed as vulnerable to extinction, the name dingo comes from the Dharug language used by the Indigenous Australians of the Sydney area. It was used to describe their camp dogs during the first contact with Europeans, the variants include tin-go for a bitch, din-go for a dog, and wo-ri-gal for a big dog. The people of the Yarralin, Northern Territory region call those dingoes that live with them walaku, the taxonomic classification of the dingo remains both confused and debated. Nomenclature provides the name that is to be used for a taxon, in 1768, James Cook took command of a scientific voyage of discovery from Britain to New Holland, which was the name for Australia at that time. In 1770, his ship HMS Endeavour arrived in Botany Bay, the mission collected specimens and made notes for taking back to Britain. On return to Britain, Joseph Banks commissioned George Stubbs to produce paintings based on his observations, johann Friedrich Blumenbach gathered together a collection from the Cook voyage and was the first to classify the New Holland dog as Canis familiaris dingo. In 1793, the Dog of New South Wales was classified by Friedrich Meyer as Canis dingo, in 1947, a proposal was made to change this classification after it was discovered that the New Holland dog Canis antarticus had been specified a year earlier in a little-known work. Both Kerr and Meyer had based their classifications on the illustration of the Dog of New South Wales, the ICZN ruled that Canis antarticus be suppressed and that Canis dingo was the name to be used for the dingo in its Opinion 451. This name was entered on the ICZNs Official Lists and Indexes of Names in Zoology. A name entered onto the Official List of the ICZN is the available name and this is the scientific name for the dingo that appears on the Official Lists and Indexes of Names in Zoology of the ICZN. This ruling did not deter some zoologists from continuing to use the name Canis antarticus in later publications, however this name has now fallen out of use

3.
Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands
–
The Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands is situated in the south-west corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia. They were named in 1802 by Matthew Flinders in honour of Sir Edward Pellew, although Flinders was the first British explorer to pass that way, his journals describe indications of some foreign people having visited beforehand. Flinders speculated that these visitors were Chinese, the islands were also sighted in 1644 by Abel Tasman who thought they were part of the mainland and called them Cape Vanderlin. The group includes Vanderlin Island, North Island, West Island, Centre Island, combined, the islands have a total area of 2100 square kilometres, the largest, Vanderlin Island, is 32 km long and 13 km wide. Most islands are inhabited by the indigenous Yanyuwa people, and are part of Wurralibi Aboriginal Land. Tourists may negotiate a fee to visit, camp, and fish there, North Island is home to the 5

4.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark

5.
Agglutination
–
Agglutination is a process in linguistic morphology derivation in which complex words are formed by stringing together morphemes without changing them in spelling or phonetics. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages, an example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or from your houses, consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts and this is the case in English, which has an agglutinated plural marker -s and derived words such as shame·less·ness. Agglutinative suffixes are often inserted irrespective of syllabic boundaries, for example, Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage. Note that the term agglutination is sometimes used more generally to refer to the process of adding suffixes or other morphemes to the base of a word. This is treated in detail in the section on other uses of the term. However, contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial, on the other hand, it is also the case that some languages that have developed from agglutinative proto-languages have lost this feature. For example, contemporary Estonian, which is so related to Finnish that the two languages are mutually intelligible, has shifted towards the fusional type. Examples of agglutinative languages include the Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and these have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllabic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is found in suffixes. Hungarian uses extensive agglutination in almost all and any part of it, the suffixes follow each other in special order, and can be heaped in extreme amount, resulting words conveying complex meanings in very compact form. An example is fiaié where the root fi- means son, the subsequent three vowels are all separate suffixes, and the word means of his/her sons. The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals is quite remarkable, almost all Austronesian languages, such as Malay, and most Philippine languages, also belong to this category, thus enabling them to form new words from simple base forms. The Indonesian and Malay word mempertanggungjawabkan is formed by adding active-voice, causative and transitive affixes to the compound verb tanggung jawab, in Tagalog, nakakapágpabagabag is formed from the root bagabag. Japanese is also a language, adding information such as negation, passive voice, past tense, honorific degree. Common examples would be hatarakaseraretara, which combines causative, passive or potential, and if could make work, and tabetakunakatta, which combines desire, negation, and past tense conjugations to mean did not want to eat. All Dravidian languages, including Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil, are agglutinative, agglutination is used to very high degrees both in formal written forms in Telugu. Agglutination is also a feature of Basque

6.
Unicode
–
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters

7.
Prenasalized consonant
–
Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent that behave phonologically like single consonants. In most languages, when a consonant is described as voiceless, it is only the oral portion that is voiceless. Thus a language may have voiced and voiceless, however, in some Southern Min dialects, voiced stops are preceded by voiceless prenasalization. Prenasalized stops may be distinguished from post-stopped nasals, such as the /mᵇ nᵈ ɲᶡ ŋᶢ/ of Acehnese, no language is known to contrast the two types of consonant, which are distinguished primarily by a difference in timing, nor are any expected to. The Bantu languages are famous for their stops, but similar sounds occur across Africa. Ghanas politician Kwame Nkrumah had a stop in his name, as does the capital of Chad. In Southern Min languages, such as Teochew, prenasalized stops are also found, the prenasalized stops in the southern Min languages evolved from the nasals of Middle Chinese and thus are historically different from the voiced obstruents found in Wu and Xiang languages. Prenasalized consonants are widely utilized in Loloish languages of Lolo–Burmese family, such as Yi, the following table illustrates the prenasalized consonants in northern Yi. The prenasalized stops also occur in several branches of the Hmong–Mien language family of Southern China, in dialects of northern Japan, standard voiced stops are prenasalized, and voiceless stops are voiced. For example, /itiɡo/ strawberry is in most of the south, prenasalized stops are also reconstructed for Old Japanese. The Guaraní language has a set of prenasalized stops which are alternate allophonically with simple nasal continuants, the Indo-Aryan languages Sinhala and Dhivehi too have prenasalized stops. The Sinhala alphabet has prenasalized versions of g, ḍ, d̪, Sri Lankan Malay has been in contact with Sinhala a long time and has also developed prenasalized stops. The spectrograms on the show the word gaambar with a prenasalized stops. The difference in the length of the part is clearly visible, the nasal in the prenasalized word is much shorter than the nasal in the other word. This phonetic information is complemented by phonological evidence, The first vowel in gaambar is lengthened, the syllabification of gaambar must be gaa. mbar then, and the syllabification of sambal sam. bal. An example of the behavior of prenasalized stops is provided by Fijian. In this language, as in many in Melanesia, there is a series of stops, and a series of prenasalized stops. In addition, Fijian allows prenasalized stops at the beginning of a word, thus the prenasalized stops behave like ordinary consonants

8.
Retroflex consonant
–
A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology, other terms occasionally encountered are domal and cacuminal. The Latin-derived word retroflex means bent back, some consonants are pronounced with the tongue fully curled back so that articulation involves the underside of the tongue tip. These sounds are described as true retroflex consonants. Retroflex consonants, like other consonants, come in several varieties. The tongue may be flat or concave, or even with the tip curled back. The point of contact on the tongue may be with the tip, with the blade, the point of contact on the roof of the mouth may be with the alveolar ridge, the area behind the alveolar ridge, or the hard palate. Finally, both sibilant and nonsibilant consonants can have a retroflex articulation, the greatest variety of combinations occurs with sibilants, because for these, small changes in tongue shape and position cause significant changes in the resulting sound. Retroflex sounds in general have a duller, lower-pitched sound than other alveolar or postalveolar consonants, and especially the grooved alveolar sibilants. The farther back the point of contact with the roof of the mouth, the concave is the shape of the tongue. The main combinations normally observed are, Laminal post-alveolar, with a flat tongue and these occur, for example, in Polish cz, sz, ż, dż and Mandarin zh, ch, sh, r. Apical post-alveolar, with a somewhat concave tongue and these occur, for example, in Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages. Subapical palatal, with a highly concave tongue and these occur particularly in the Dravidian languages. These are the dullest and lowest-pitched type, and when following a vowel often add strong r-coloring to the vowel and these are not a place of articulation, as the IPA chart implies, but a shape of the tongue analogous to laminal and apical. Apical alveolar, with a somewhat concave tongue and these occur, for example, in peninsular Spanish and Basque. These sounds dont quite fit on the front-to-back, laminal-to-subapical continuum, with a relatively dull, the subapical sounds are sometimes called true retroflex because of the curled-back shape of the tongue, while the other sounds sometimes go by other names. For example, Ladefoged and Maddieson prefer to call the laminal post-alveolar sounds flat post-alveolar, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ is an allophone of the alveolar approximant /ɹ/ in many dialects of American English, particularly in the Midwestern United States. Polish and Russian possess retroflex sibilants, but no stops or liquids at this place of articulation, in African languages retroflex consonants are also very rare, reportedly occurring in a few Nilo-Saharan languages

9.
Front vowel
–
Front vowels are sometimes also called bright vowels because they are perceived as sounding brighter than the back vowels. Near-front vowels are essentially a type of front vowels, no language is known to contrast front and near-front vowels based on frontness alone, rounded front vowels are typically centralized, that is, near-front in their articulation. This is one reason they are written to the right of unrounded front vowels in the IPA vowel chart, in articulation, front vowels contrast with raised vowels and retracted vowels. In this conception, front vowels are a broader category than those listed in the IPA chart, including, raised or retracted vowels may be fronted by certain consonants, such as palatals and in some languages pharyngeals. For example, /a/ may be fronted to next to /j/ or /ħ/ and this change can be allophonic variation, or it can have become phonemic. English follows the French pattern, but without as much regularity, however, for native or early borrowed words affected by palatalization, English has generally altered the spelling after the pronunciation Back vowel List of phonetics topics

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) is an independent Australian …

A Sea of Hands outside the AIATSIS building on Acton Peninsula. The Sea of Hands was created in 2014 with the help of local communities, to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the National Apology to Australia's First Peoples, 2008.

The Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies (GERAIS)

Chrissy Grant, Chair of the AIATSIS Research Ethics Committee, running a GERAIS workshop at AIATSIS, 2015

Part of the UNESCO listed Australian Indigenous Language collection held at AIATSIS

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin …

Image: Cardinal vowels Jones x ray

The authors of textbooks or similar publications often create revised versions of the IPA chart to express their own preferences or needs. The image displays one such version. Only the black symbols are part of the IPA; common additional symbols are in grey.